Category: AIS

I remember a few years ago when some boaters worried about “Big Brother” style AIS surveillance while the IMO fretted about hobbyists using shore receivers to display real time coastal AIS info on the Web.  But all that seemed to go away, because — I think — people realized that AIS is indeed a public information network and that there is nothing especially threatening about its use by agencies or amateurs.  But today I was struck by a “fatcat1111” comment stating that “I absolutely do not want to update the Fed with my location every 30 seconds” and that he or she hadn’t felt that way until they read the Practical Sailor article above by marine safety expert Ralph Naranjo.  Well, maybe I’m completely blind about “personal freedom” but I’ve read Ralph’s article a few times now, and I just don’t get it…

While exciting things are happening on the frontiers of AIS, there’s still some tragic ignorance about what the technology can do right now for marine safety, even from folks who should know better.  But...

Why not ask the man who wrote the book?  Dr. Andy Norris writes authoritatively about ship level electronics for the Nautical Institute and Digital Ship; has chaired IEC Technical
Committee 80 on maritime navigation since 1992; once worked as Technical Director for Kelvin Hughes and helped start ChartCo; and is himself a sailor who’s earned an RYA Yachtmaster Ocean certificate.  Plus he’s helped Panbo readers (and writers 😉 better understand the limitations of AIS before.  So when I recently attempted to deconstruct the notion that watchkeepers use filtering tools built into the new ship radars with integrated AIS tracking to completely ignore Class B AIS targets, and then found indications that it is sort of possible, I asked Dr. Norris — whose IEC committee wrote the spec — to please “clarify just what’s permitted in terms of AIS target filtering.”  The issue, he warned me, “is more complex than it looks”…

One of several things I like about the latest (2.29) version of the Ship Finder HD AIS viewer for the iPad is that when you zoom out you’ll see available targets grouped by the shore receivers that Ship Finder’s developer (“pinkfroot” is its unusual name) currently has access to.  Some users seem to have a hard time getting the concept, but as I’ve written before, “the most important thing about a remote AIS viewer — be it on the Web,
or an iPhone, or wherever — has to be the data feeds it uses.”  Pinkfroot now also has a free Web viewer that shows the same data feeds.  The truth is that coverage around much of North America is pretty darn spotty and will stay that way until more of us set up receivers and give the data feeds to Pinkfroot and all the other developers who rebroadcast it for public enjoyment…

The Vesper Marine WatchMate 850 Class B AIS transponder, which just received FCC approval this week, is already a very interesting product, as discussed here in September.  But an extra feature that hadn’t been developed back then, and still isn’t mentioned on the Vesper site, is the ability to use the unit as an anchor watch.  And it can be an especially effective anchor watch thanks to the intrinsic nature of AIS and the WatchMate’s particular characteristics…

Oh my.  This morning an email alerted me to this photo of an AIS Display Filter menu on a Furuno IMO-class FAR-2117 radar, and Steve Dashew’s understandable misunderstanding of what it means.  The seductive myth that ships have the technology to completely ignore Class B AIS transponders is back!  And the comments that follow demonstrate just how destructive that myth is, like:  “Wow. That is really disturbing. I am sure it is something that the
manufacturers of Class B transceivers don’t want us to know. I have been
waiting for the Vesper Marine transceiver to become available – I might
opt for the receive only unit now and save some $$$.”  Here’s the truth:  No matter how that display filter is set, the 2117 radar will continue to track all AIS targets and will automatically display a filtered one — in flashing red, with a buzzer, even! — if it should enter the watch keeper’s area of collision concern, which is exactly how the IMO intends to improve big ship AIS monitoring!…

Another show, another nifty AIS appliance from Digital Yacht.  Following the introduction of the iThing-friendly iAIS receiver in Southampton, DY showed up at NMEA with the AISnet receiver above.  It’s a pretty obvious concept, but I don’t think it’s been done before, and it could encourage a nice proliferation of land-based AIS stations flowing target data onto the web…